Honoring the Land 3D

“I love to think of nature as unlimited broadcasting stations, through which God speaks to us every day, every hour...How do I talk to a little flower? Through it I talk to the Infinite. And what is the Infinite? It is that silent, small force… that still small voice.”

~Dr. George Washington Carver

Honoring the Land uplifts ecological humility as part of the cultural heritage of Black and Indigenous people. While our 400+ year immersion in racial capitalism has attempted to diminish that connection to the sacred earth, there are those who hold onto our ancestral practices that revere land and water as family members. Our very survival depends upon assuming our rightful places as the younger siblings in creation, deferring to the oceans, forests, and mountains as our teachers, and learning to listen to Earth’s guidance.

xóchicoatl bello of la mala yerba and Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm will guide us through this workshop, weaving together a sweet bundle for participants including how to:

• Make prayers and offerings to the land in the Yoruba Orisa and Mexica traditions
• Ask permission of the Earth in the Vodun tradition
• Cultivate the art of listening to our beyond human siblings
• Be in reciprocity with the spirit of the land and people of the lands we make our homes on
• Deepen with our collective responsibility as earth stewards

Language: The instruction will be delivered in English.

Cost: The sliding scale is $5-100. Please think generously - what could be more important to contribute to than living food, land sovereignty, and skilled farmers spreading the love and knowledge?!

While the workshop is designed to be a culturally relevant and safe space that centers Black, Indigenous and People of Color (read why here), an instructional video is available on YouTube as part of Soul Fire’s Liberation on Land video series for everyone to enjoy. LOL - Honoring the Land // Honrando la Tierra with Ria Ibrahim & Leah Penniman.

Donations are accepted from those who would like to support BIPOC participant attendance. Those who donate will receive a recording of the workshop and accompanying resources, following the workshop.

Registration and donations close Monday, May 9 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time.

Presenters:

xóchicoatl bello (they/she/amor) is an indigequeer cultural worker, educator, and elder-in-training. They focus on cultivating cultures of healing by restoring our connections to the sacredness of self, each other, earth, and ancestor through ceremony, circle practice, indigenous technologies & agricultural traditions. They have co-created healing spaces over the last decade in Boston Public Schools, community gardens, in the Hudson Valley with Kite’s Nest and Sweet Freedom Farm, and across Turtle Island through their distance herbal & healing programming explicitly for queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, people of color through La Mala Yerba. Their work invites community into herbal medicine making, farming, ceremony, and circle. xóchicoatl believes that these indigenous technologies keep our people healing for generations, and how we find our way back from the violences of colonization and transform the wounds of oppression into more healthy, harmonious, and justice-filled relations with self, community, and the Earth. They hold healing spaces in relationship with the Earth with the prayer that when we heal the soils that sustain us, tend to the seeds, tend to our hearts, and tend to our relations, we remember our bodies as sites of wisdom, we heal our souls, and awaken the freedom we were born with.

weave with them on at lamalayerba.com or on IG @lamalayerbalove

Leah Penniman is a Black Kreyol farmer, author, mother, and food justice activist who has been tending the soil and organizing for an anti-racist food system for 25 years. She currently serves as founding co-ED and Farm Director of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York, a Black & Brown led project that works toward food and land justice. Her book is Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. Find out more about Leah’s work at www.soulfirefarm.org and follow her @soulfirefarm on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Soul Fire Farm is an Afro-Indigenous centered training farm committed to ending racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system. Our food sovereignty programs reach over 10,000 people each year, including farmer training for Black and Brown growers, reparations and land return initiatives for northeast farmers, food justice workshops for urban youth, home gardens for city-dwellers living under food apartheid, doorstep harvest delivery for food insecure households, and systems and policy education for public decision-makers.